Retailers generally attempt to maximize profits or other performance metrics such as sales volume through different types of retail strategies. In order to keep current customers and gain additional customers, retailers invest in retail strategies to provide an appealing arrangement of products on display. For example, retail assortment planning is a strategy used to specify a set or an assortment of products carried by a retailer that meets the customers' product preferences. Retail assortment planning may encompass selecting an assortment of products to offer for sale that would maximize a selected performance metric. Retailers may also attempt to display an assortment of products on shelving and display units that meets customers' unique behaviors, needs and expectations. The shelves and display units may be arranged in aisles and have various configurations and dimensions. Thus, retail assortment planning may encompass determining configurations of available shelf space that would maximize the use of the available shelf space.
However, despite engaging in retail assortment planning, retailers regularly lose volume and profits on unpopular products. This is because of the difficulty in determining how a deletion or an addition of a product or a multitude of products affects an overall performance metric, such as profits or sales volume, of an assortment of products. For example, retailers either assume all sales volume is lost when a product is deleted from an assortment of products or estimate how much sales volume may be lost when a product is deleted from the assortment of products based on the importance of the products. However, with both of these methods, it is difficult to determine which assortment of products is best for the store because the assumption that all sales volume is lost and the estimation of lost sales volume based on the importance of the products may be inaccurate.